Humanism, Secularism, Feminism

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.

Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She started writing when she was 13. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the Royal Academy of arts, science and literature from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism,USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize at the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels and Ananda literary award again in 2000.

Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.

Taslima has written 35 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been prevented by the authorities from returning to her country since 1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.

Irresponsible Irrational Indonesia! Islamic Idiotic Insane Indonesia!

We live in an insane world where we get exiled, we get banned, we get burned, we get sentenced to death,sentenced to life in prison,sentenced to years in prison if we tell the simple truth, ‘God doesn’t exist.’

The truth is imprisoned. The lie is free.

Indonesia is not Saudi Arabia or Sudan. It is not Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Indonesians are a mix of almost everything. The diversity of Indonesia’s many religions, languages, cultures and ethnicities is a treasure to be appreciated. Indonesia has world’s largest Muslim population but it has always been a tolerant country.

Indonesian national airlines Garuda was named after the Hindu mythical bird Garuda.

Hindus believe that Garuda is the carrier of the God Vishnu.

Good old Indonesia has now started having Sharia Laws that discriminate against women and non-Muslims and it has started harassing and arresting atheists, secularists, humanists and thinking minds.

Religion makes people insane. In today’s world, Islamic faith makes people more insane than any other faiths.

Comments

Personally I take all tales in Hindu or any mythology as just that – tales. Like Christ rising from the dead or Athena springing forth, fully formed, from the head of Zeus.

We needs tales, fiction, stories. All cultures have them; all cultures should. What we don’t need is to start believing in their literal truth. Their emotional, cultural and psychological significance may be profound, and is of course subject to criticism and analysis, but taking these often wonderfully vivid and entertaining stories as the truth in the same sense that two and two are four, or that the sun revolves around the earth, is to do ourselves and others a grave disservice.

another thing i just learned is that when you say “we” you mean homo sapien i get that & I like that.
btw my doG is only 2 years old and he’s already reading, The Greatest Show On Earth, and getting in touch with his wolf so i thought id djust put that out ther

The march of fundamentalism across the world alarms me. It’s most frightening in the Muslim world. Previously, Indonesia and Malaysia had very open, more woman-friendly cultures that defied thegeneral Islamic trends. Indeed, many Arabs considered SE Asian Muslims “not really Muslim”.

Now, Indonesia is changing. From Aceh, where Shariah law is enforced oficially and unofficially by goon squads, to official declarations that Islam is the official religion (as if we didn’t know), …

And nobody has adressed the problem of Irian Jaya effectively. because of the Dutch colonial rule, western Papua New Guinea was included in Indonesia. The people, languages and cultures have nothing in common with and nothing to do with Java or Sumatra.

”
The principle insurgent organization, the Free Papua Movement (OPM), has been accused of human rights abuses such as hostage-taking, summary execution, and sabotage.[6], while the Indonesian government is accused of human rights abuses, such as attacks on OPM-sympathetic civilians and jailing people who raise the OPM’s Morning Star flag for treason.[12] Official estimates are that 150,000 Papuans (more than 1% of the population) were killed by the military between 1963 and 1983 alone[4].

Through the transmigration program, which since 1969 includes migration to Papua, about half of the 2.4 million inhabitants of Indonesian Papua are born in Java.[4] Such communities of migrants are frequent targets of OPM attacks, though intermarriage is increasing and the offspring of transmigrants have come to see themselves as “Papuan” over their parents’ ethnic group.[13]
”

In effect, one culture/ethnic group is trying to govern and eventually obliterate another.

In things I’ve read about Indonesia and from those who have visited, the gist of Indonesia’s attitude toward religion is, You MUST have a religion. It may not have to be muslim, but it has to be one of the six largest or you will be denied basic human rights. Small wonder the far right in the US likes the place so much.

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